Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989, Berkeley, CA) is a transdisciplinary artist, performing, writing, composing, and directing elaborate narrative scenes that subvert pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity. Through works created in diverse media—music videos, billboard campaigns, episodic films, photographs, live performance artworks, and publications —Gutierrez investigates identity as both a social construct and an authentic expression of self. These complex intersections are innate to Gutierrez’s own multicultural upbringing as a first-generation artist of Indigenous descent, her transgender identity, and as an LGBTQ+ ally.
In 2018, Gutierrez produced Indigenous Woman, a single-issue 124-page magazine, working as her own muse, model, photographer, editor, and art director, and dedicated to, as the artist describes it, “the celebration of Mayan Indian heritage, the navigation of contemporary indigeneity and the ever-evolving self-image.” In the recent series Body En Thrall, which started in Indigenous Woman, the artist embodies a character, now blonde, who acts alongside male and female mannequins to explore the limits of her own erotic power. Sought after by women across the cultural and socio-political spectrum, the blonde that Gutierrez studies and embodies is hyper-visible and over-exposed. With an eye on the simultaneous desirability and tragedy of Hollywood’s innumerable “fallen” blonde starlets, the artist delivers an inquisitive, if not irreverent look at the cultural trap society has laid out for a specific, narrow, and ultimately infeasible idea of womanhood.
This presentation is organized in conjunction with Gutierrez’s Monsen Photography Lecture on May 17, 2024. This annual lecture brings key makers and thinkers in photographic practice to the Henry. Named after Drs. Elaine and Joseph Monsen, the series is designed to further knowledge about and appreciation for the art of photography.
